Embedded Safe Reactive Navigation for Multirotors Systems Using Control Barrier Functions
Embedded safety filter for obstacle avoidance in autonomous aerial robots. Nazar Misyats, Marvin Harms, Morten Nissov, Martin Jacquet, Kostas Alexis Aiming to promote the wide adoption of safety filters for autonomous aerial robots, this paper presents a safe control architecture designed for seamless integration into widely used open-source autopilots. Departing from methods that require consistent localization and mapping, we formalize the obstacle avoidance problem as a composite control barrier function constructed only from the online onboard range measurements. The proposed framework acts as a safety filter, modifying the acceleration references derived by the nominal position/velocity control loops, and is integrated into the PX4 autopilot stack. Experimental studies using a small multirotor aerial robot demonstrate the effectiveness and performance of the solution within dynamic maneuvering and unknown environments.
International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), May 2025
Paper (DOI) | Preprint (arXiv) | GitHub Abstract